Every year the dry season brings problems to Nepal, but this year has been exceptional. Depending on who you ask, there has been no rain in Kathmandu for 4 to 6 months. Of course this causes problems with crops and means that fewer wells have water. With terrible pollution from decrepit vehicles and slash-and-burn agriculture, lack of rainfall also results in a thick layer of pollution hanging in the air throughout the Kathmandu valley. As you might imagine, respiratory infections are common here.
Furthermore, all of Nepal's electricity comes from hydroelectric power, so the dry season also brings a shortage of electricity. The situation is so bad this year that electricity is only available for a few hours each day. To make matters worse, these precious "white-ins," as I call them, often occur after midnight. There is no real schedule to all of this, so everyone (including businesses that rely on electricity) has to play a guessing game. Ironically, it is Nepal's cities that receive the fewest hours of electricity each day. For instance, Kathmandu only had about 4 hours of electricity while we were awake; there was often another 4 hours while we slept.
Sadly, there is more to Nepal's electricity problem than just a lack of water. I am told that many hydro-electric plants are out of commission due to poor maintenance. Furthermore, during the recent Maoist revolution, insurgents destroyed power plants. Now that they are the ruling party, the Maoists are suffering from their own sabotage; they refuse to fix the problem, as they blame the previous party for not fixing it earlier. Lastly, part of Nepal's limited electricity is being supplied to India, as a method of repaying past debts.
For all of these reasons, people have been hoping and praying for rain, and you can imagine their joy when the first rain in six months finally came! Katrina and I were lucky enough to be in Patan's Durbar Square on our way to dinner when the lightning started. I hurried back to the guesthouse to grab my camera gear, and poor Katrina was left holding a box of take-away momo's while her obsessive husband ran around hoping to catch lightning flashes with long exposures.
The rain finally came down in force and we had to take shelter by squeezing against the palace wall with a number of other people. Then the hail came. Fortunately, this was not the baseball-sized hail that had caused fatalities last year, but it came in buckets! During a brief respite in the storm, Katrina and I high-tailed it for the shelter of a restaurant. We dined by candlelight (both romantic and a necessity!) while the skies opened up again and hail came down so fiercely that the restaurant's courtyard started to look like an ice skating rink.
After the rain stopped again, we quickly paid our bill (needless to say, I tipped our poor waiter rather heavily) and headed for the guesthouse. In the square, people were celebrating the coming of rain, and kids were excitedly splashing around and throwing fist-fulls of hail. The streets were now ankle-deep rivers of rushing ice water, but we were able to edge our way down the narrow raised sidewalks, and arrived at the hotel with miraculously dry feet. To top it all off, there was electricity waiting for us! (Talk about a trifecta.)
That was our last night in Nepal, and we are now in Thailand, where last night it rained for the first time in months -- just call me "Rain Maker!"
